"Trust Me" - Season Finale Blog for Chattanooga Free Press

By Doug Cook for the Chattanooga Times Free Press

Doug Cook is a Creative Director at ND&P

"Express Yourself: Trust Me “Takes it the Bridge” to Close Season One"

Read the blog post at the Chattanooga Times Free Press...

These artists locked in and cruised, lost in the work and the sweat and the synchronicity of minds and bodies moving in harmony, exchanging information, feeding one another, intuitively, sensually, until finally reaching another plane where time and space feel transcended and we begin to . . .

No, wait! This is about Conner and Mason and the very marginally fonky cast of Trust Me, the TV programme on TNT. Not the magnificently funky cast of Charles Wright and the Watts 103^rd Street Rhythm Band, with whom I’d briefly slipped away by way of the sound box and a stunning set of rare jams, allowing the double episodes of Trust Me’s “0’s n’ 1’s” to accumulate by the gazillion on my little Comcast® DVR.

(I watch the show then go back and catch the commercials. Trust me. Yeah, I used that doo-blay entendre one. Last. Time).

So, enough about me and my feeding habits. What about this TNT “drama” as they like to call it? In a nice change of pace, Sarah takes a more prominent role as she develops a bond with key client Dove, leading up to a big L.A. shoot. We see her in pre-shoot conference call—she and her client in Chicago--with a caustic, finicky Swedish film director, Jann (unironically pronounced “Yawn”), yakking on his cell phone in Los Angeles as he zips around a sound stage. All of this against the backdrop of an agency in crisis, as the management team tries to make up $45-millon in lost billings—in a recession. This observation from Mason’s boss, Tony Mink, portrayed by Griffin Dunne, the one thespian in this roller rink with some legit major movie credits.

Sarah—temporarily partnered up with Mason--has written the spot with a woman on a park bench during winter. Jann sees spring. So, to and fro they go, mildly bickering in the client’s presence—generally poor form, but sometimes happens—as the producer (dependent on the Jann for sustenance) runs interference for spring, while Sarah pulls like a dog with a sock for winter and the prima donna—and Jann just gets distracted.

The next day’s shoot is a disaster that in the real world would’ve gotten the agency and director fired at point blank range, but let’s not quibble over dramatic stretch. Suffice to say Jann’s steamed at Mason, Mason sells Sarah promptly down stream and both Conner and Tony turn up to help save the shoot and horn in on the Buick account during another agency’s shoot nearby.

Sounds pretty Marx Bros., but it wasn’t quite that unhinged.

Over last night’s two hours, much drama ensued. A few pieces of it felt real—and I caught my wife laughing out loud once (not at the drama, but an actual comic bit), but all five dogs slept through it.

We did learn that Tony is actually CEO Denise’s former mate (spouse?), but not before they throw down as she’s firing him. A lot of other heavy stuff happened, and I’m sure you’ll catch all of that on the Season 1 DVD.

What the hey—spring for the Blu-ray with all the trimmings!

So, two hours later as the clock strikes double-chopsticks, both episodes have unreeled (or de-digitized, as it were), and we are left to humbly assay all that has gone before during these topsy-turvy months we will fondly recall simply as “The Trust Me Year”: The silly roller-chair rally around the office as Tony benignly watches. Sarah’s rise and fall (and rise, and fall, and . . . ). The junior creatives, slowly expanding their cardboard characters, peeling away the layers until they reveal, well, maybe men formed of house-brand aluminum foil. Mason, one big bundle of pent-up ambivalence, one foot in the family and the other firmly planted in the workplace.

Conner—quirky, quippy and cute Conner—finally brought down low and resolved to be a better Connor—all the result of his roundabout with the client “contact” on the energy drink account and a near-miss with the dread, sexually transmitted Chlamydia.

That’s it. A season complete. Or was it first and last for these wacky, would-be ad guys and gals? I would imagine we’ll soon hear, and my money’s on darkness.

Ah, Trust Me on TNT at 10 on Tuesdays (formerly Mondays), we hardly knew ye.